Alright, @AliceWeir, it was obviously a mistake and you usually seem like a normal online user and you are totally OK in my book. But come on, that was fucking funny.
Although, I will add, if you think your generation doesn’t mythologize the 60s, you are smoking a rock.
Boomer been in IT since 1979. Boomer sez, “This !@#$ forum leaves much to be desired on the droid, jacks up replies and edits often.”
Still, funny.
Smoked you share before you were a zygote. Funnier part is being told I am ‘mythologizing’, by someone who did not exist at the time. Even extremely baked, I was actually there, lol. (Any in-situ mythologies created at the time of bake were just the fringies of the times., nostalgically and affectionately, if dimly, recalled. Was actually awake and straight for most of it, though.)
Is the “… and everyone is writing a book” version not actually Cicero either then? Dang.
I wouldn’t trust my recounting of the 00s to be accurate on much beyond me being alive for the time period - it’s hard to be objective and precise about the past as I remember it.
(I was born in '83, for reference.)
Research backs you up on that. What we remember and what actually happened are often not even in the same ballpark.
I’ve been fortunate, in that a friend from about 45 years ago contacted me recently and thus have gotten some corroboration for memories from that specific time period. But there were many stories she related that I had no memory of at all. In fact, most of her stories were new to me, despite the fact they were ABOUT me. And she didn’t know me before then, so there’s only so far back she could relate.
It’ll be interesting to see how things change now that the current generation is growing up with selfies and TBs of videos. They have actual proof to look back on.
Fair enough, but just because you were there doesn’t mean you aren’t necessarily mythologizing to an extent, because I think we all mythologize, sometimes in glossing over the bad stuff, and sometimes to highlight the bad stuff (I had a tendency to do that, I think)… but I wasn’t saying you specifically anyway, I meant our culture tends to mythologize the 60s, and has started to do it with the 70s and 80s (especially punk). Think about how Hollywood treats that era, for example. Forest Gump is as fine an example I can think of that mythologizes the 60s in film–highlighting the peaceful events, glossing the violence and discontent. Plus, remember that human memory is a fallible thing, and tends to become muddled with distance and other inputs. Again, I’m not trying to single you out or show how you are “wrong” about the era, just pointing out the tenuous nature of memory, especially collective memory.
Sorry, I’m a structure dude for the most part when it comes to these things.
Born in 83… Damn millennial, with your texting, and sexting, and snapchats and facebooks, etc – get off my gen-x lawn and @AliceWeir’s boomer lawn!!! 
I think there is some research on memory that shows we often construct new memories, from half remembered events and various media inputs, among other things. Our brains (unless you happen to be one of those people with photographic memories) are weird things that aren’t necessarily an accurate thing. They work to make us happy, though, so they construct memories that fit in with our cognitive biases… It’s kind of weird. That’s part of the reason why some historians frown on the use of oral history, though I think that put into conversation with other kinds of sources, they can be incredibly useful. @AliceWeir pointed out the unreliability of print/textual sources, and that’s true, but used in conjunction with oral histories, and multiple written sources talking about the same thing, it can be useful in getting at some sort of narrative that might resemble what actually happened… but I’m not sure on that.
I’m a couple of years too old, so I sadly missed out on the entire sexting thing.
I don’t have a facebook account, either … though that’s more of a “look at me, I’m special”-thing, to be honest. (My three most used phone app are the something awful forums reader, gmail, and the sms/mms app.)
I do wonder how retrospectives of the late '90s and onwards will look - we’re well past the point where the biggest problem is the amount of data, not the lack of it. I just hope youtube will keep everything available practically forever; it’ll be a treasure trove in a few decades.
You’re welcome to join us Gen-X/Boomer luddites! Welcome to the fold brother… Maybe we should be just overthrow the tyranny of generations (I think someone pointed out that they are kind of nothing more than marketing mumbo-jumbo) and come up with our own things that make sense of us!
I too am free of facebook and have never sexted (though I do text).
The amount of bands I apparently saw in the 80s is quite the list, so I’m reliably(?) informed…
LOL! Which ones DO you remember?
Oh, lots. Not as many as I should, apparently.
There’s nothing inherently Luddite about just saying no to Wastebook. I don’t like drama, therefore, I have never myspaced or Book of Faces, or joined any other nexus of watercooler fare.
I think the reason kids were sexting there for a while (and now, some very clueless middle-aged adults) is that they fundamentally do not understand how bits and/or the internet work.
In summary, we’re not necessarily Luddites, we may just be better at recognizing the potential pitfalls.
Possibly, you partied even harder? Tough to imagine - but the mary jane strains were being drastically improved.
I’m just laughing anyway - because yes, there wers ome incredibly difficult things going on, and no, my memory is not perfect at all. Short-term memory is damaged. OTOH - I can recall events clearly going back to 24 months of age, which is unusual. I have a mentally ill family member who often recounts events that don’t resemble my recollections - sometimes, of things that happened within hours and inches of me. So - insisting how well one recalls is of little value. It’s…variable, definitely!
Not buying the ‘selfies/snapchat’ theory. I presently have no less than 6 35-galllon containers filled with snapshots, formal portraits, VHS, polaroid, and 8mm of life up to this point, and several more of just documents. That documenting on one’s life has been going on for a long time - it just didn’t get posted to the internet.
Because my interest in history started as doing genealogy work, I spend a whole lot of time looking at source documents, rather than books. So, I study people and their relationships first, and then dive in to find out what their lives were really like. It’s very different than going in books-first. I am endlessly amazed at how much the textbooks leave our or get wrong! But one thing I did learn from this - the use of language is a huge key. And being able to read old script and typefaces - which are often read wrong today. Because, language is by definition a collective experience. And it changes often. New experiences require new ways of describing that experience. Like…‘cowboy’. That was an insult that if uttered, pretty much doomed you to a sound butt-kicking at the time. Hollywood later coopted it, and it became a common way to refer to ranch hands.
Anyway - to argue ‘generation gap’ means to argue a term that only can into existence in the 60’s - to describe that experience. It was that palpable to people. When you casually use terms that were brought into common parlance at a given time - no, you don’t get to argue original meanings. Current meanings? Sure. Things do change. But ‘generation gap’ hasn’t been one of those. If you will argue, then argue between GenXers and Millennials - not Boomers.
The sentence, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” doesn’t elicit any sense that people of any group or age had major agreement. It insists that events were VERY heavily polarized, and attitudes about it polarizing as well. The sentence became a cliche, because polarity.
I can tell you about the groups I was part of, but little of the others.
New things came into existence in the 70’s - for example, Black Studies (then called African American Studies) and Women’s Studies. They never existed prior, and were written from scratch - at a time when civil rights and gender equality were a couple of those heavily polarizing issues. That they have since become mainstream and some of the material is better-represented in general courses is just great…but keep in mind how the curricula was formed, and by whom. You’d think nothing else was happening at the time, and that both racism and gender issues were so overwhelming that even redlining bankers were bent on turning away money?! What was true, is that a whole lot of that social impetus was powered from, and occurred at, various college campuses. And that is a rarified atmosphere that takes itself quite seriously, and often is not exactly representative of the common experience at all. I’d caution against textbooks as a sole source, because textbooks are both agenda-driven and then sanitized as part of the publication process. (And yes, people who write textbooks have to make a living - just that they fill their resumes with authorships and their pockets from teaching gigs.)
If you disagree, then prove me wrong. Approach a couple of random Boomers. Ask them what redlining is. Ask them when they actually saw ‘white flight’. Ask them what SALT stands for, etc. Then you’ll see what I mean.
You know I was just joking right… cause I was just joking…
Getting to where I can’t even joke any more… :-/
Believe it or not, all I did was drink a bit (and not even to any unusual levels for a student). It’s more that it all floats together a bit, and the specifics are mostly about things that are too niche or personal to give an especially good picture of the decade. For anything more general, I just don’t trust myself to tell the difference between what I thought then and what I now think I must have thought.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
